The Case Against Competing

Back in the Middle Ages when I was still with Fortune magazine, we had Warren Buffet in for an editorial lunch. With characteristic charming Midwestern self-effacement, the Great Investor waxed happy about a recent acquisition, the Buffalo Evening News. He loved the fact that it was the only player in what had become essentially a one-newspaper town.

“Gee, Warren,” I had the temerity to say to my fellow Nebraskan, “You don’t seem to like competition much.”

“I don’t, Walter” he replied heartily, “I don’t like it at all. I don’t know any good businessman who does.”

In subsequent pronouncements and actions, the Sage of Omaha has made clear his preference for businesses with “a moat” around them, a monopoly position or a formidable brand that spares them the necessity of constantly fighting off scrappy would-be rivals. The lesson seems clear: If you can avoid competing, by all means do so.

Buffet has done quite well following his own advice. But this isn’t a luxury afforded to all businesses, or even to most. There are libraries of books and articles offering counsel on how to steer clear of the profit-sucking aspects of competition—including via white spaces and blue oceans—and their advice can be invaluable. But I would go one step further and suggest that avoiding competition is a condition, or more precisely, a frame of mind, that more should aspire to. An overweening focus on beating the other guy, gal, or outfit is just as bad for your psychological and moral health as it is for your business.

The observation “comparisons are odious” dates back at least to the 15th century (long enough for Shakespeare to work a comic riff noting they’re also “odorous”). But with the rise of mass media (ranking everything—colleges, wines, doctors), social media (mean girls rule), and workforce management software, they stink even more. Particularly when applied to people, where they’re typically reductive, misleading, harmful, and say more about the person making the comparison than the persons compared. How many true winners divide the world into “winners and losers”?

Similarly, if your business and its people take competing as Priority Numero Uno, they’re prey to obsessing over comparisons—our market share vs. theirs, our cost position relative to them, our comparative product quality. While these are all good things to know, and may serve as goads to action, by themselves they rather miss the point. Did you or the founders of your enterprise get into business to take share, cut costs, and generally show the other guy up? One hopes—and suspects in the case of the best companies—that other ambitions were at work, other desires, dissatisfactions, or curiosities. Perhaps to create the best burger, medical device, smart phone, or advisory service. Such ambitions typically entail a focus on, even an obsession with, customers, clients, would-be users of your product. Someone out there that you can serve, in other words, not defeat. And to which banner do you expect to rally the best, most creative employees: “We can make something great” or “Kill the enemy”?

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Incitements to beat up the other guy too often lead to beating up yourself or your people. “Team,” accompanied by a heavy sigh or angry grimace, “I can’t believe you lost that sale to those devils from Zorch Corp.” Implicit message: “You are pathetic losers compared to that bunch of pitchfork wielders.”

It’s no better, and in fact may be worse, when the dialogue is purely internal: “Why can’t I ever do better than Dick and/or Diana Daring? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?” Answers are seldom in short supply. But the problem is that too tiresomely often they’re the same answers, not born of current competitive realities but from some chorus of nasty inner voices carried around since childhood.

Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, recently wrote an essay in the London Review of Books, titled simply “Against Self-Criticism.” A Freudian himself, Phillips invoked the Founding Father’s tripartite division of the human mind into id (that churning cauldron of instinctual energies), super ego (sitting above it all, cheering or booing), and ego (sandwiched between the two, desperately trying to mediate between them and the outside world). The super ego, we are reminded, itself has two parts, the conscience (punitive, critical, nagging away at us) and the ego ideal (holding up the image of all the excellence we might become).

To simplify Phillips a bit, the problem with listening overmuch to the conscience is that the conversation gets boring really fast—it’s just the same old deflating criticisms hammering away at us like propaganda. You don’t learn anything new.

Which is precisely the danger to a business from too fanatic a concentration on competing. The corporate mindset gives way to “Why do we keep screwing up?”—perhaps interrupted by equally mindless episodes of chest-thumping if you happen to win. Lost along the way are, “Gosh, those devils over at Zorch seem to be doing something interesting. What can we learn from them?” Or, “We set out to make the best industrial fasteners in the world. What can we do today to move a little closer to that goal?”

And you can also take a cue from one of the hardest-throwing and most enduring pitchers who ever lived. Probably the best known quotation from the eminent “management philosopher” Satchel Paige is “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” But perhaps even more relevant here is another recommendation attributed to him: “Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.”